Ask HN: Establishing content origin/ownership

What are current best practices for establishing ownership of web content.

In particular I am looking at the case where website A authors and posts original content on their site and N sites simply scrape it. The concern being other sites ranking better for content that (a) violates copyright and (b) they did not author.

Does Google use a simple "first to be crawled" process or is there a better way to establish content origin/ownership? Google Authorship, I think, was an attempt to solve this problem. No longer supported. Also, that was linked to a person. It would be more desirable to link it to the site that owns and originated the content.

Any thoughts?